The present application is concerned with a network device and its error handling relating to a transport stream of a sequence of packets via which a video data stream is transported.
Depending on the application, transport packet based video data stream transmission suffers from packet loss. Such packet loss may, for example, result from transmission errors exceeding an error correction capability of an optionally used forward error correction of the transport stream, the lack of any uplink connection so as to send acknowledgement of receipt signals, or a combination of both. Irrespective of the availability of an acknowledgement of receipt uplink, it is desirable to keep affected portions of the video data stream, not decodable due to the non-receipt of lost packets, as small as possible. Disadvantageously, however, packets of the transport stream may carry information necessitated for decoding the content carried by subsequent packets of the transport stream. In the HEVC standard, for example, the video data stream is composed of independent slice segments and dependent slice segments, the dependent slice segments depending on independent slice segments as far as, for example, the slice header data is concerned which is contained in the immediately preceding independent slice segment and inherited for the decoding of the dependent slice segment.
Accordingly, it would be favorable to have a concept at hand which enables a reduction of the amount of affected, non-decodable portions of a video data stream in the presence of packet loss.